Every task page carries a table of success criteria, published before you start. Most people read it once, at launch, and never again — and then hand in work that misses two rows they could have fixed in twenty minutes. This page is the twenty minutes.
We do this together the first time, on somebody else’s work, so the move is not new to you when it is your own that is being judged.
The routine
- Open the task page and put the criteria table beside your work.
- Go row by row. For each one write yes, not yet, or partly — and one sentence of evidence: the file, the line, the thing the reader would see. “Yes” with no evidence is a wish.
- Find your weakest row. Not the easiest to fix — the weakest.
- Write one sentence saying what you will change, and when.
- Fix it — in the rest of this period, or in the next one. This is why the self-check is never scheduled on the day something is due: a judgement you have no time to act on is just a worry.
Steps 2 and 3 are the whole exercise. Naming your weakest row honestly is harder than any of the fixing, because it means saying the thing you have been hoping nobody would notice.
One row, judged honestly
From The Helper Script: “Survives bad input — the failures found in the hunt are handled or declared.”
Partly. It handles an empty file and a missing file. It crashes if the file has a blank line in the middle, which I found on Tuesday and wrote in my journal as “fix later”. Weakest row. Change: handle the blank line, then re-run every row of the test plan, next period.
That entry is worth more than “looks good to me” on all eight rows, and it took less time to write.
Where this fits
Your judgement of your own work is not part of your mark, and neither is a classmate’s — see How Marks Work. That is deliberate, and it cuts both ways: nothing you write here can cost you anything, which is exactly what makes it worth writing honestly.
What it does change is the work. A self-check that leads to a fix is the cheapest mark improvement available in this course, and by the end of the semester it is a habit you run without being asked — which is the actual point.
One last thing worth doing: read your judgement out loud to the person next to you. It catches the rows where you were being generous, and you will usually hear it yourself before they say anything.